November 7, 2011

Lucy's Apartment in Daegu

This weekend I went to go visit Lucy in Daegu and stay with her host family! Leslie and I came on Saturday morning to spend about 36 hours in one of the bigger cities of South Korea.

Lucy’s host family consists of a hostmom named jooyoung who speaks English fluently and her job is translating tourist brochures and signs into English. (She actually translated all the brochures that we used in Gyeongju!) Her dad, who I can’t remember what he does but he doesn’t speak much English, and two host brothers Min Jun who is in 3rd grade and very VERY good at English and Min Sa who is in first grade and also surprisingly good/humorous with English.

It was nice to have Leslie around because she would translate what Min Sa was saying to Lucy and her brother which ended up being things like “In the name of Justice I will punish you!!!”

Leslie and I arrived around lunchtime so we had a very nice lunch out then went to a show with the whole family called High Kick. It is the sequel to the show Jump which Monica and Aunt Elizabeth saw when they visited Seoul. High Kick was about soccer and most of the show was them doing cool soccer ball tricks. After High Kick Joo Yung, Leslie, Lucy and I went up a mountain (in a car) and saw one of the biggest temples in Korea and I think it was the most beautiful one that I’ve seen so far it had a really great lantern tunnel to a huggee Buddha and other nice temple rooms. We went to dinner in a restaurant up in the mountain by the temple then went to a tea house and spent about 2 hours talking which was very nice.

After we got home Leslie had to meet her friend so we went downtown and got ice cream with her. Leslie’s friend works at CampWalker one of the army bases in Daegu (I think there are three). We also met one of her friends briefly named Garren who has been at CampWalker for 18 months and he says he’s supposed to be stationed there again which is unusual but he’s happy because he likes Korea.

Coldstone was nice but we were all really tired at it was about midnight when we got home. Leslie asked Lucy about taking a shower in the morning then Lucy had to explain that her hair had clogged the shower drain and that we can only leave it running for 15 seconds at a time so at 1am we decided to try and fix Lucy’s drain.... unfortunately it didn’t really work out but it was pretty funny at the time.

In the morning her mom made us a feast. She had made banana pancakes, French toast, scrambled eggs (I avoided those), cereal, hash browns, yogurt and then a bunch of Korean dishes too. We had about 20 minutes to eat everything before going to their church that Lucy teaches Sunday school at.

Lucy’s host family actually founded their church which is a “nondenominational” English church. Lucy had told me stories about how she didn’t really agree with the pastors preaching’s so I decided to stick around Sunday school with her instead of going up with the congregation. (Leslie went and she said I would have died because all he talked about was the commandment about not murdering and she thought it was a bad mass.) Lucy is one of the three women that were there working at Sunday school and that Sunday was the day they decided to start on the Christmas play which they adapted to some sort of animal craziness and all the army brats (there were like 4 Korean children and then the rest were just children/literal brats of the militants from Camp Walker) were going crazy about their parts. It made me happy I don’t speak the same language as the students I teach.

After mass the church served everyone lunch which turned out to be curry, yum!! Then Lucy was supposed to have Youth Group but there was a lot of things going on (they were originally supposed to go to a zoo type place then bowling then everything was cancelled so they were going to do a lesson lead by Lucy) and NO ONE CAME. So Lucy, Leslie and I said goodbye to the host family bought tickets home and sat in a coffee shop for 2 hours.

The coffee shop was really cozy and I had a great Lemon Slush (I had a lot of coffee at lunch and seriously, how often do you find Lemon Slushes in Korea?). All and all I had a great time visiting Lucy seeing Leslie this weekend.

Now it’s Monday and I would be sad exxxcceeepppttt I’m getting an iPhone!! J more on that later!!!!!!!!!!!!!